Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TC1BPN20ZJ8VPPE8G0MBN8

The neon sign above the Raven's Nest hummed green against the rain, and inside, the bottles along the back bar glowed like something on a chemist's shelf. Rory sat at her usual spot at the far end, delivery jacket steaming on the stool beside her, both hands wrapped round a mug of tea Silas had poured without being asked. Tuesday. Two regulars murmured over dominoes in the corner, and the old maps on the walls had gone soft at the edges with decades of smoke. "You've got the look of a drowned crow." Silas worked a cloth round a glass, signet ring clicking against the stem. "Flattery'll get you everywhere." "Six drops in this weather. Cheung's working you like a pack mule." "Cheung pays. Weather doesn't." The door swung in on a gust and a woman stepped through, shaking her umbrella twice against the frame. A small gesture, twice-folded, fussy and familiar. Recognition arrived before the name did. Camel coat darkened at the shoulders, hair gone sleek and expensive, heels that had no business on a night like this. Nia Bevan. Four years gone, and there she stood under the green wash of the sign, looking for a dry seat and finding a ghost instead. "Rory?" "Hello, Nia." "Christ. Christ alive." The laugh came out of her unchanged, the same bark that used to set off whole seminar rooms. She crossed the floor in four strides and wrapped Rory up, wet coat and all. Rory's arms came up a beat late. Nia felt it. Rory watched her feel it, watched her file it away under things not to mention yet. "Large red." Silas set a glass down before Nia had finished sitting. "House. You had the look of it coming through the door." "I could kiss you." "My wife would object." He limped back down the bar, and Nia's eyes followed the ring, the grey-streaked beard, the quiet of him. "Who's that?" "Silas. Landlord. Friend." "You've got people, then." "One or two." Nia shrugged out of her coat and looked at Rory properly for the first time. Rory saw the audit happen. The jacket. The moped key on the bar. The hands round the tea, chapped from handlebars and October. Nia's face rearranged itself and Rory let it, because there was no version of this that skipped the audit. "Deliveries." "For the Golden Empress. Round the corner. It pays the rent. Most months." "You were top of the cohort, Rory. Top. Old Meredith used your essay as the model answer. Kept it in a drawer like a relic." "Meredith kept everything. Man had a drawer full of bus tickets." "Don't." Nia's voice dropped. "Don't do the bit where you make it funny so I can't ask." Silas had retreated to the far till, polishing glasses that were already clean. The domino players clicked on, indifferent. Rain worked the windows. Rory turned her mug a quarter circle and her thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist, an old habit, older than any of this by twenty years. "Ask, then." "You vanished. One day you were there, and then your mam's telling half of Cathays you're in London and you're fine, and nobody's heard a word. I emailed. I wrote an actual letter. Like a Victorian." "I know." "Eva wouldn't tell me a thing. Just that you were safe. She said it like she was reading it off a card." "That was all there was to tell, for a while." Nia worked the stem of her glass between finger and thumb. The ring on her left hand caught the light, plain gold, and Rory nodded at it. "Gethin. Year above us. The one with the car." "The one with the car." Nia's mouth softened. "We've a boy. Two years old. At home with my mam in Pontcanna right now, probably teaching her bad habits." She got the phone out, and Rory looked at the photos because that was what you did. A round-faced child scowling at the camera. "He's got your scowl." "He's got his father's everything, worse luck." Nia put the phone face down and the softness went with it. "I heard about Evan. After. Bits of it." "Bits." "Rory. His cousin's birthday, that club on St Mary Street. I'm the one who introduced you." "You didn't introduce us. You were sick in the taxi and he gave me his chips." Rory kept her voice level. "You can't take credit for the chips, Nia." "I saw him take your arm once. Outside Gethin's, that last summer. You wanted to leave and he wanted to stay, and he had your wrist, and you did that laugh, the one that means nothing's wrong. And I let it go. Got in the car and let it go." Nia's glass had stopped turning. "I've thought about that night more than I've thought about most things in my life." The bar held its quiet. Silas set down two small glasses of something amber between them and moved off without a word, and Rory was grateful for him in a way she couldn't have said out loud. "On the house," he murmured, halfway down the bar already. "You look like two women who've earned it." Rory picked up her glass. The whisky burned a clean line down. "I left at four in the morning with one bag and Eva's spare key in my pocket." "What happened?" A long pause. Nia didn't fill it, and Rory respected her for that more than for anything in four years. "He put his fist through the bathroom door because I'd locked it. To take a bath." Level. Cool. A fact from a file. "It wasn't the first thing. It was the last one." Nia's hand came across the bar and settled over Rory's. Rory let it stay for three seconds, then turned her palm up and gave one squeeze, which was the most she had in her. "I should have said something. That night. I should have dragged you into the car." "You did say something. Once. Second year. You said he was a lot, and I didn't speak to you for a week." "I remember." "So we were both cowards about it, in our own ways." Rory drank. "Done now." "Is it?" "It has to be. I've got deliveries at nine." Nia laughed despite herself, wet around the eyes, and wiped under them with the side of her hand, practised, a mother's move. Then she sat back and looked at Rory the way you look at a house you used to live in. "The house on Rhymney Street. The boiler." "You had to kick it. There was a technique." "You drew a diagram. Pinned it to the wall." "It was a good diagram." "It was a beautiful diagram." The laugh arrived late but it arrived whole, and for a moment they were nineteen and freezing and invincible in a terrace in Cathays. Then it faded, and what was left was the truth under it. "We were going to be barristers." "You were. I was going to marry someone rich and summer in Tuscany." "You said that with your whole chest, aged nineteen." "Nineteen's an age for saying things with your whole chest." Her phone buzzed. A cab, two minutes out. Nia stood and shrugged the camel coat back on, and Rory watched her become the London woman again, piece by piece, scarf, bag, phone. Then Nia took a pen from inside the bag and wrote a number on the back of a receipt from her purse. "My mobile. I'm up every month now. Depositions, training, the lot. The firm's got an office off Chancery Lane." "You don't have to—" "Ring or don't. That's yours to decide." Nia set the receipt on the bar and held it down with one finger for a second, as if it might blow away. "Just don't vanish again. Once was enough for one lifetime." At the door she stopped and looked back, and her face did something complicated before it settled. "You look like yourself again. That last year in Cardiff you looked like a photo of yourself with the colour gone. I never said it then." The umbrella snapped open. "I'm saying it now." The door swung shut and the green neon hummed and the rain took her. Rory turned the receipt over. Nia's handwriting hadn't changed, all forward lean and no patience. She read the number twice, folded it once, and put it in the inside pocket of the delivery jacket, next to her heart, where the rain couldn't get at it. Silas limped down the bar and collected the glasses. "Old ghost?" "Old friend." "Good kind or the other kind?" "Jury's out." He huffed through his nose and took the whisky away and put the kettle on instead, because he knew her better than most people knew anybody. Rory reached for her tea, and the sleeve of her jumper rode up past the small crescent scar, and she left it where it was.